“The Red Grip on Shanghai”: Anticommunism in the International Settlement Newspaper Culture of Shanghai, 1925–35

In February 1926, an article in the North China Herald & Supreme Court and Consular Gazette railed against Soviet influence in Shanghai, arguing that Soviet advisors in the city encouraged Chinese communists to practice free love, stage industrial protests, and—above all—to hate Britain. Its author’s obvious distaste for communism was one example of many hundreds that appeared in English-language Shanghai papers in the decade between 1925-35. This paper will explore the culture of anti-communism articulated in Shanghai’s vigorous newspaper culture during a period when the fortunes of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) underwent drastic change. Prior to April 1927, English-language newspapers in Shanghai—frequently dominated by British writers—wrote from a defensive position, fretting over the negative effects of the Soviet partnership with the nationalist Guomindang Party. After Chiang Kai-Shek murderously turned on the CCP in April 1927 and then outlawed the party, anti-communist rhetoric in the newspapers shifted to a more confident (even smug) tone in support of Guomindang anti-communist persecution. When dissenting voices like Soong Ching-Ling, Agnes Smedley, and Harold Isaacs called this rampant anti-communism into question, they were met with strident rebukes in editorials. I argue that the anti-communism in these newspapers was a reflection of—even while it helped to shape—a pervasive culture of global British anti-communism in the interwar period.